The Hillside Rock

Fayetteville Arkansas | 2015 - Present

The Hillside Rock House is located on a dramatically sloping three-quarter acre wooded site. The house is designed as an abstract geologic outcropping whose form emerges from physical transformation in response to the desire to provide distinct views from each main living space. Three separate terraces are cut into the otherwise solid volume that each allows a different perspective of the site and surrounding environment. The first porch, off of the living area, overlooks the neighborhood through the wooded front edge of the site. The second porch, off of the large bedroom, overlooks the Boston Mountains to the south. The third porch is nestled within the woods and creating a private enclave off of the dining area. The interior of the house is a split-level organization that adapts to the hillside slope.

Mood Ring House

Fayetteville Arkansas | 2013 - 2014

Mood Ring House is an exploration of how architecture can have different day and night presences with distinct experiential and spatial qualities. This unique house is located in an eclectic neighborhood near the town center of Fayetteville, Arkansas. The “T” shaped volume is born out of a mix of site limitations and opportunities, economic constraints, and programmatic requirements. With a skewed alignment to the lot lines, the siting preserves two established monumental trees, orienting the house to take advantage of north light from a clerestory, and south and west facing views of the immediate forest and distant mountains, all while fronting the main intersection near the property. A live-work space, work functions are consolidated on the ground, with a majority of living spaces above. The small base aids in reducing the footprint, preserving existing trees, and reducing foundation costs, which are a premium in the unstable Arkansas soil. The cantilevering upper level, in concert with the dramatically sloping site, affords views to the living spaces, creating a private enclave amidst the tree canopy. Beneath overhangs is a carport on the west facing front and an outdoor room on the east facing rear. The shed roof, open to the north, when coupled with an inverted truss profile, flood the interior volume with natural light. At night, illuminated soffits construct volumes out of projecting colored light from concealed LED fixtures. Colors are derived either automatically from the temperament of the house or directly by owners’ desire.

Photography by Timothy Hursley

The Visual Biography of Color

The Visual Biography of Color considers color as a vital, communicating, cultural mechanism. Instead of an dense aesthetic treatise or narrative conceit; the book utilizes data visualization techniques to animate the substance color in both high and low-brow culture to reveal how deeply embedded the value of color is in our color-full environment.

The Visual Biography takes readers on a journey through the visible spectrum. For instance, RED encounters the evolution of red states in the U.S., the compilation of every red subway line in every major world city collapsed onto a single page, and a radiant wheel that displays every major song that has red in its title. The Visual Biography ultimately brings into appearance a glimpse of the complex hidden architecture of color's meaning to the world.

Forza House

Akron Ohio | 2015 - Present

A modest single family house with a distinct front and back.

Semiautomatic

Semiautomatic Cenotaphs are memorials for victims of mass gun violence in the United States; the projection of an architectural antidote to the increased frequency of shootings and the disturbingly short cycle of shock, grief, loss, and forgetfulness that accompanies the spectacle of the tragedy.

The project considers how contemporary design technologies and techniques might find political agency, transforming automated design and construction into a critical practice with a social agenda. The work was focused by questioning if the coded language of computational scripting can be asserted with the same ideological force of prose in the modern manifesto.

The rhetoric and capacities of mass customization are germane to recording the effects of gun violence in architectural form. Every mass shooting affects culture at two scales: holistically when considering the tragedy of mass shootings as a national (or global) phenomenon, and locally in the nuanced experiences of communities, families, and individuals. The design approach for the Cenotaphs commences from this observation in the development of a system to account for both the common resemblance and personal specificity of each event of gun violence. Similarity is achieved by constraining the proportion and shape to a sphere modeled after Boullee’s Cenotaph for Isaac Newton, scaled down to reflect the intimate context and for ease of implementation. The distinct aspects of each shooting are captured in the architecture through an algorithm that articulates material differences between structure, thickness, and opacity from data unique to each event.

Upon the receipt of information about victims, shooter, weapon, and location of the mass shooting, the Cenotaph design is instantly generated from the parametric script without the architect’s intervention, fabricated by robotic casting from a concrete with metallic aggregate from recycled guns, and air-lifted into place immediately after the site is cleared by security personnel. Capitalizing on the acceleration available through automation, architecture can short-circuit the process of implementing a memorial, and by its very appearance protract awareness of singular acts of gun violence before they are forgotten. As a population of memorials across the United States, the repetition of experience brings attention to the ongoing debate regarding America’s relationship with the gun, and collectively manifests a significant architectural response to the nearly 220 mass shootings since Columbine massacre in 1999.

Reflects

Cleveland Ohio | 2015

Reflects is a treehouse without trees located in the Cleveland Botanical Garden's "Secret Garden" courtyard. We saw this limitation as an opportunity to transform the treehouse it into a unique sculptural object.

As a point of departure, the gabled house profile creates an iconic and memorable image. The house archetype floats above the surrounding walls. To create the “trees” that the house rests on and within, reflective surfaces are introduced, and the house profile is symmetrically mirrored down, creating a series periscopes that capture surrounding views, transforming them into a “Secret Forest” within the Secret Garden. The abstract, planar, and porous architecture, in combination with the surface reflection, produces a variety of dynamic effects whether on the ground or above, outside or within, engaging everyone in the treehouse experience.

Constructed of a light steel frame and infill panels of laminated plywood, the composite system provides a minimal and low impact assembly. On site construction was minimized by prefabrication off-site, limiting disturbance to the Cleveland Botanical Garden grounds.

North Church

Cleveland Ohio | 2009 - 2013

North Presbyterian Church transforms an industrial warehouse into a multi-purpose worship space for an urban congregation that serves the homeless and needy in Cleveland, Ohio.

The site for the new church is a decommissioned industrial warehouse building where the congregation is strategically collocated with a series of affiliated nonprofit social organizations that share services and infrastructure. Existing size limitations meant the sanctuary was required to be a shared space with all tenants providing large meeting and assembly spaces divisible by movable partitions.

The architecture capitalizes on the multi-purpose function of the sanctuary to enhance the spatial qualities that characterize sacred worship space (symmetry, volume, indirect/ambient natural light). Conceived as a hybrid canopy/cathedral, a ceiling surface undulates to create a series of vaults that maximize the spatial volume available and conceal the appearance of hardware and headers required for the movable partitions. The faceted ceiling panels are subdivided into an animated triangular pattern developed to simultaneously maximize material economy, ease of construction, and visual complexity.

Archi-Graphic

Published by Laurence King | 2015

Archi-Graphic: A Visual Operation places architecture on the operating table, using infographics to cut a visual cross-section that investigates the field. The intention behind Archi-Graphic is that knowledge of the richness and complexity inherent in the discipline and profession of architecture can become an accessible and even desirable pursuit for architects and non-architects alike. This book aims to be informative without being especially didactic, engaging both serious and humorous themes. Archi-Graphic peers into issues within architecture that are rarely tackled: personality, color, gender, ethnicity, construction expense, and life span are visually revealed through vibrant infographic diagrams. Ultimately, information is an abundant resource that lacks quality and this book challenges that condition, situating itself as a cross-disciplinary project between architecture, graphic design, art, information graphics--an exploration of the architecture of information.

The Hedge

Fayetteville Arkansas | 2014 - Present

The Hedge is a proposed Baptist Mission Center serving University of Arkansas students, and is located across the street from Bill and Hillary Clinton’s historic house in Fayetteville, Arkansas. The ABS Mission Center (known as The Hedge) originally brought the project to us with questions as to whether they should re-brand their organization and abandon from the religious symbolism the hedge, which refers to a protective envelope that God places around his followers. Rather than abandon this symbolism we embraced its architectural potential as both a diagram and material identity. In doing so, the project took hedge beyond symbol to become an architectural organization that instigates a vibrant inner social life that grows from inside out to create a singular and unifying exterior volume.

The vegetation that makes up the majority of the exterior envelope has varying presences depending upon the level of care that the ABS Mission chooses to give it. The building therefore is placed in a continually oscillating cycle between unkempt hairiness and well-manicured topiary; unbound to a single way of being.

The site sits at the southern edge of the University of Arkansas campus in an area that is currently undergoing a radical change in scale due to the university’s housing expansion program. The architecture anticipates the changing nature of the street to a more public realm. The Hedge is "pruned" to create public space along the street while revealing interior spaces. The distinct presence of the interior is marked by a mass painted with warm colors that change as one progresses vertically through the building and site. Ultimately, this creates an public connection to the varying events within the building with the hopes of expanding the Hedge's mission.

Split Personality House

Johnson Arkansas | 2013-Present

This house is located on a 20 acre site, the majority of which is in a floodplain, forcing its siting to be precariously close to an existing road and generic suburban subdivision. Despite the limitations of the site, the existing natural landscape is a mysterious and beautiful enclave of four diverse landscape types. In turn, the architecture was conceived as four main rooms, each with a distinct character and view of the four environments. Between rooms, spaces are split apart to create interstitial spaces that reveal unique connections between landscapes.

Box and Bridge House

Fayetteville Arkansas | 2013 - Present

The Box and Bridge House is an urban house adjacent to the historic square in downtown Fayetteville, Arkansas. Designed with a modest budget, the house addresses the street formally while screening itself from a fire station which is its northern neighbor. The south side of the house provides summer shading while opening to a view overlooking the Boston Mountains. The garage roof acts as outdoor living space that takes advantage of views to the surrounding neighborhood and hills beyond. The architecture of the main living space is conceived as a bridge between the garage and master suite volumes.

Super Sukkah

Kemper Art Museum | St.Louis | 2014

Awarded by an open national design-build competition, Super Sukkah is a temporary pavilion that reconsiders the traditional Jewish Sukkah as a 21st century phenomenon. The brief called for a space that exists between absence and presence, thus this design imagined the Sukkah as a three-dimensional shelter with a distinct day and night presence. During the day, the Sukkah subtly merges with its surroundings while at night, interior illumination gives it an emphatic figural character. The geometry is developed to generate a form that uses a minimal amount of material to create a maximal amount of space--a structurally interconnected volume whose surfaces continuously change in scale and orientation to enhance the effects of reflection and illumination.

Fayz Box

Fayetteville Arkansas | 2015

Fayz Box is a testimonial recording booth for the Fay Jones School of Architecture + Design. The Dean required the Fayz Box be deconstructed, stored easily, and reconstructed quickly throughout the academic year. To accomplish this, the project is a knock-down kit of components that can be assembled by a layman with limited knowledge of the project. When disassembled and flat-packed for storage, the 4’x8’x8’ installation fits into a 4’x8’x8” volume. The logistical constraints meant that the construct is a light frame and a thin envelope. The design superimposes competing patterns of formal and material content that create depth in the flat; an attempt to project substantial volume within a skin. Each “layer” has its own logic of fabrication, organization, and articulation.

Barn Again

Fayetteville, Arkansas | 2013

Baltimore, Maryland | 2014

Inspired by Phoebe Lickwar’s photography of Falling Barns from the Ozark region, this installation synthesized two oppositional conditions whose qualities were consistently revealed in the images: the persistent iconic figure of the flat gambrel façade and the dynamic filigreed space of collapsing wood members suspended in animation. As such we combined techniques from the recent history of the architectural folly beginning with profile to create the memorable image of vernacular or iconic form that transforms into an animated volume of flocking lines made possible by parametric procedures.